


Love Is For Children

by muninandhugin



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Ficlet, Identity Issues, bucky/nat - Freeform, winterwidow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 05:13:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15744999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muninandhugin/pseuds/muninandhugin
Summary: This is the love that broke her faith. Faith in her country, faith in her cause, faith in people to be predictable, easily manipulated, everything she was told they were to be to her, tools or sheep. But tools don’t turn in your hand and change you. No one told her sheep wear masks, too.





	Love Is For Children

**Author's Note:**

> A tiny ficlet for my fellow WinterWidow fans who love the relationship in the comics and want to see more of it. Unbeta-ed, so all typos or mistakes are my own.

Love is for children.

This is the love that broke her faith. Faith in her country, faith in her cause, faith in people to be predictable, easily manipulated, everything she was told they were to be to her, tools or sheep. But tools don’t turn in your hand and change you. No one told her sheep wear masks, too. 

——

The first time she met the Winter Soldier she was eight. This was before her hair had been dyed the red of patriotism. She was a little mouse, in a room of other little mice learning to outwit the cat. He was to play the cat.

The games weren’t obvious death games, not unless you looked close. He taught them to use their size, the expectations of others, against their opponents. She thrilled at his approval. She wanted to be like him, a warm dark shadow. 

With no explanation his lessons stopped after a week. The little mice moved on. Next they would be spiders.

——

The second time she met the instructor her class had nicknamed Soldat was before graduation when she was seventeen. Her tights felt itchy with her nerves and sweat, but she ignored it. He looked over the class doing their warmups, his dark hair pulled back, his eyes distant. He took each student through her paces. Relevé in fifth, grand jeté, retiré devant. He adjusted their technique silently, hands precise and perfunctory, his blue eyes icy cold. Then he got to her. 

She waited for his nod and began her dance. His hands at her waist in the lifts were warm, even the metal one. The metal one? Where did that come from? She faltered on the landing, her toe shoe slipping, but she caught herself. She brushed the thought away and continued her dance. With the last notes of the music dying she knew she had failed, but when she looked up expecting to be sent away she thought she saw a flicker of... something in his eyes. 

He only nodded and gestured for her to take her place with the rest of the confirmed graduates. 

——

When next she saw him he was not the Winter Soldier she had been told about. He was near feral, wild and in pain like a wolf in a trap. The handlers warned her not to get too close in this mission, but that he would support her and the cause. His mask and goggles covered that beautiful face, one she knew could be used to as great an effect as hers. She wondered why the handlers didn’t use this to their advantage, it seemed a waste. 

With mission success high in her veins she met him at the rendezvous point and grinned. She reached up slowly and ran her fingertips along the edges of the mask. 

“May I see you?” 

“There is nothing to see,” he said, turning his face away from her hands. “I am a ghost. Not even the memory of a dead man.”

She froze at the frank finality of his tone. “If they have made you a ghost for real then they have made a widow of me even before I had a chance. Do you think that’s true, too? That everyone I choose for myself will become ghosts?” She was angry, angrier than she expected, at him, at herself, at her handlers. 

He looked at her, his goggles obscuring any reading she could get from his eyes. He was utterly still for a moment, and then he reached up and took off the goggles and mask, lowering them slowly. 

“Be thankful you have ghosts, little spider, I do not even have those.” The bleakness of his expression moved her. She went to him and lightly pressed her lips to his, not a demand or a seduction like she would a target, but a show of faith and an invitation. His arms came around her and she felt like this was perhaps the first decision she had made that was selfish and wholly her own. 

This was where she began to choose her own way.

——

The next time she saw him was Odessa, but he did not remember. Then DC. And he still did not remember. She did not tell Steve, what good would that do? Then Geneva happened and she whispered around his metal hand at her throat, warm as ever, “you could at least recognize me,” but it seemed he could not. Maybe it was time to let it go, bury it among the other memories she could never be sure really happened. He remembered everything else, everyone else, but she was just a warm shadow blending into the dark.


End file.
